Movieshack keeps intruders at bay with ICONZ secure
When hackers targeted online DVD rental company Movieshack it turned to ICONZ for a managed security solution to protect its server and website...
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Launched in 2004, Movieshack is an online rental service which provides nationwide access to a wide and ever growing library of DVDs. For a flat fee per month, members can rent as many DVDs as they like with up to 6 DVDs out at a time. Movies are delivered nationwide, and overnight to most major cities and towns, with pre-paid return envelopes provided. The simplicity and convenience of the service has appealed to city dwellers and rural customers alike. Movieshack’s catalogue now runs to 10,000 individual titles, and its web site (at www.movieshack.co.nz) is among New Zealand’s top 15 busiest online destinations. “We’ve got a lot of customers in Auckland and other cities but we also have customers in the Chatham Islands,” says Movieshack director James MacAvoy. “Movieshack appeals to the people in town who are too busy going to the video shop and to the people in the country who can’t because the nearest outlet is 45 km away.” Industrial strength internet “We looked at where we wanted to be and we knew that we would need industrial strength service with a lot of bandwidth.” Movieshack selected ICONZ in preference to the major DSL providers mainly on the grounds of scalability and flexibility. “We needed high upload as well as download speeds - it had to be fast both ways,” says MacAvoy. “A DSL solution would have been download-centric and it wouldn’t be able to scale to the amount of bandwidth we require.” After discussing Movieshack’s requirements ICONZ set up a broadband connection to Movieshack’s own servers using Vector’s fibre-optic network. The Movieshack site now receives 3.6 million page impressions a month. According to MacAvoy this level of traffic puts Movieshack “somewhere above the Yellow Pages and slightly below the White Pages.” “From day one it was made clear to us that if we needed to increase the bandwidth by ten times we could call ICONZ and it would be done, but so far we’ve been keeping pace with the traffic,” he says. Phishing attack “We noticed that a machine out there somewhere was attempting to install a phishing attack zombie on our server,” explains MacAvoy. “Our Cisco router was managing to protect us but we could see they were trying to get on our server.” If it had installed successfully the zombie program would have sent out spam emails to lure people to a spurious web site designed to capture their banking details. As it turned out, this particular attack was doomed to failure. Not only was the zombie a Windows-only program that could not be installed on Movieshack’s Unix server but the spam emails were aimed at customers of a certain American bank so they were unlikely to succeed in their fraudulent purpose in New Zealand. “We could see that the zombie program was trying to find Windows directories that weren’t there,” says MacAvoy. However, if the phishing attack had been even partially successful it could had eroded performance by stealing bandwidth and more importantly, potentially damaged Movieshack’s reputation. Movieshack therefore decided to bolster its security by installing ICONZ Secure. ICONZ Secure is an integrated suite of security services that provides a managed network security solutions built around Watchguard Firebox X500 firewall hardware. “Because it’s a managed intrusion detection system ICONZ does all the upgrades,” says MacAvoy. “This means our security system is kept up to date, ready to deal with the latest threats.” Movieshack hasn’t experienced any further attacks since February but should any hackers target the site in the future, MacAvoy is confident that ICONZ Secure will keep the intruders at bay. For more information Movieshack ICONZ Secure |
August 2005 James and Nick MacAvoy, Movieshack
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